Astronomers have been puzzled for years by the appearance of a strange object in the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Now, a team of scientists from the University of California in Los Angeles (USA) seems to have solved the mystery of the object baptized as “G2”: it is a pair of binary stars that would have been orbiting a huge black hole in our galaxy, eventually merging into an extremely large star shrouded in gas and dust. The research has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters .
“ G2 survived and continued happily in its orbit ; a simple gas cloud would not have done that. G2 was hardly affected by the black hole. There were no fireworks, says Andrea Ghez, the study leader.
Nothing can escape the gravitational pull of a black hole, not even light. Despite not being able to be seen directly, its influence on nearby stars is visible. According to the researchers, G2 appears to be an emerging class of stars near the black hole that is created due to the powerful gravity of the black hole . This force impels them to unite in a single star.
“This may be happening much more often than we thought. The stars at the center of the galaxy are massive and mostly binary . It is possible that many of the stars that we have been observing and that we did not understand what they were, are the end product of the mergers of binary stars that are now calm, ”Ghez continues.
The research was carried out from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, which has two optical and infrared telescopes; the largest in the world. These telescopes use adaptive optics, a powerful pioneering technology that corrects for the distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere in real time to more clearly reveal the space around a supermassive black hole.
